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Plugin Availability For Non-x86 Browsers?
Foredecker writes: "Many, many Internet appliances are being built with non-x86 processors such as Mips, ARM and PowerPC. Supposedly, one of the barriers to using such processors in Internet appliances is the notion that x86 has, by far, the advantage that many popular browser plug-ins are only available for x86. If they are available for non-x86 systems, then they are either available late (x86 first) or their are inferior to their x86 brethren. Is this a problem? Is it true? If it is true, is this going to make it harder for non-x86 based Internet appliances to win acceptance in the market?" Earlier this year, we talked about how the Web is now flooded with non-HTML content. Now I don't mind enhancing one's Web experience, but it would be nice if the folks who make these plug-ins realize that the Web is not only for those folks running Wintel or Macintosh systems. When will plug-in makers realize that there is a larger market out there who may also be interested in their product?
Last time I checked some statistics, the various variants of Windows ran 95% of the browsers, Mac 4% and "Others" one single percent. Thats Linux, Solaris, BSD etc combined!
This means that unless you are specifically targeting the slashdot crowd, you have no reason to care wether your pages work outside the Windows/Mac world.
Most clueful webfolks stay away from the plugins anyway, since they add more maintenance cost to your site then they are worth. Nobody cares wether that single percent can view the site or not. If they can, its a bonus, if not: their problem.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
because it's not a 'larger' market. The target market is the home consumer, which think Linux plays a piano.
The Game Guy
Java is the solution for internet appliances. Projects like Mozilla will bridge the platform gap, and special plugins and browser extensions could be written in java. Java's UI has come a long way with JDK 1.3.
Someone you trust is one of us.
From a business standpoint, it's wonderful to have flashy content (and I don't mean only Macromedia's stuff)
But it's also a bad thing to leave a large portion of users behind.
Internet Appliances along with mobile phones and other devices now getting on the internet are lumped under the heading of *PERVASIVE DEVICES*, or pervasive computing.
There are currently two options available to address these devices.
Option one is to follow the model of Phone.Com. Sell the browser to the device companies and collect a license fee for each device sold. Then sell the access point for those devices a proxy software that converts html to code for their browser.
Option two is to use IBM technology. WebSphere Transcoding Publisher (ok, I'm biased, I know people on this team) runs on an LDAP, proxy, or reverse-proxy model, and checks to see what device-type is accessing a page. If it has a device type profile for the device making the http request, it translates the code (transcodes) the html into code suitable for the device, along with altering the images to meet the device's needs.
If a transcoder device type profile were written for the various internet appliances and other non-Wintel/Mac browsers then non-html content requiring plug-ins would no longer be an issue.
Of course, this is kind of a dodge- No phone that I know of attempts to be a desktop computer browser (yet), and while we might expect that an internet appliance that hopes to be the desktop browser should play flash and shockwave content, it's not a desktop computer, and we shouldn't expect it to be one.
Yes, I like my alternative opsys' browsers to be supported, but no one writes flash plugins for NetPositive, and my Netscape Communicator on OS/2 relies on flash plug-ins for win3.1.
I don't think the fault for this situation lies with the makers of plug-ins, it lies with the page designers for not providing a stripped down version that doesn't require plug-ins, and with the internet appliance marketeers for inspiring false expectations.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
As someone who used to be involved with producing a plugin for a particular alternate image file format, I can honestly say there are several issues associated with trying to produce and maintain plugins for multiple platforms -- not the least of which is maintainability and keeping them all current. Add to that the hardware costs of releasing a binary for linux-libc6-strongARM and every other os/hardware combination you can come up with, and you wind up with exactly the same cost-benefit analysis situation you do when producing any other proprietary software. We were among the best in terms of cross-platform support at our peak (fall '96), with:
- Win 3.1
- Win 95/NT
- Mac 68k
- Mac PPC
- Sparc Solaris 2.4
- Digital Unix 3.2
all as supported platforms, but invariably there'd either be somebody grumbling about the fact that the "latest" version wasn't out for Solaris yet (hey, at least we had one), or "can you make one for Irix?" or whatever; the fact remains, most plugins are made by small companies who are doing the best they can with the resources they have to support the most people.Don't chime in about open-sourcing the codec either: compression codecs are exactly one of the r&d-intensive products for which retaining closed-source is the only viable revenue model that ESR talks about in "The Magic Cauldron." If the only thing you have of value is your algorithm, you really can't distribute source that everyone can implement.
The point is, there is no good solution: if you are building a site that contains essential content, don't use non-standard technologies (I'd argue this includes Java applets). Conversely, if you're not using the same technology as 80% of the people out there, and I too am in that outer 20%, prepare to fall victim to the 80-20 rule when vendors of everything, including browser plugins, do cost-benefit analysis.
MOO;IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
Pity those of us who want to create innovative content using a "specialized plug-in" such as Chime. (Chime allows 3d molecular display in a web page. Yes, there are Java applets that do this. When one of them can do 1/10th of what Chime can at better than 1/10th the speed I might look into it again.)
Chime lets me write pages like these: Atomic orbitals and Crystal unit cells Very useful in my line of work (Chemical education) But as soon as I do this I lock out all "alternative OSs"
Chime's actually more cross platform than most: Windows, Mac and an older IRIX version. It even is anti-MS: it runs like crap in MSIE on both Mac and Windows. (The Mozilla team fixed the compatibility problems when I sent the bug in.) But I can't do this stuff and make it truly cross-platform.
This is a problem for me: in fact, it's one of the main reasons I don't use Linux on the desktop.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
You mean an open standard like Macromedia's Shockwave Flash format, complete with an open implementation. It's not a W3C standard, and hence sites shouldn't use it exclusively (there should always be a non-flash option), but the specs and a reference implementation are freely available. Ideally, the W3C would adopt it as an official standard, but it would need work on accessibility issues first (e.g., for those using text-only, or braille or voice browsers).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
If I can't visit a site without having to load a plug-in or activating Javascript then I will tend to steer clear. I know of one site that requires you to install shockwave to view their site and you can't see the html because there isn't any, even worse the company's market is Unix based, predominently AIX and there isn't even a plug-in for that platform - this is a serious problem. Before adding plugins to a website the following question should be asked:
- Can your audience run the plug-in?
- Do they have the authority to install it?
- Is their connection fast enough to download the plug-in?
- Why should the user go through the hassle just to see your site?
- Does your audience have the knowledge to install a plug-in?
- Why can't you make do with standard HTML?
- Is your connection really that fast? - go and try seeing your website from elsewhere
Yep, I am anti-plug-in and with good reason, though I will allow for a movie player that plays either MPEG, AVI or Quicktime - partly because movies are a missing element in the standard web file formats.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I don't have any plug-ins installed on my system, and I've never had a problem - the only one I'd consider is one for PDF, as that is accually used. I've only seen a couple web sites that even have any other plug-in requested (shockwave or flash - or are thsoe the same?) and every one allows easy bypass. I might miss some fancy animation once in a while, but I've never found a web site where that was critical. I've seen far to many websites where java script or graphics were critical (forcing me to abandon lynx for netscape), something I mind when I'm after information that shouldn't require either, but don't mind when it is accually useful. Case in point: My bank requires javascript, but I once figgured out how to bypass that check and I couldn't find a thing that didn't work.
When netscape asks if I want to download a plug-in I hit no. I don't trust random binaries on my system, I'm uncomfortable enough with pre-compiled netscape (someday I'll compile mozilla and solve this), and I compile everything else.